I’ve had a problem with having a consistent sleep schedule since I was a little kid. I remember staying up until 3 or 4 in the morning reading under my blanket with only a little night-light (possibly contributing to my horrendous eyesight as well as my degree in literature). With the Paris summer, during which the sun didn’t set until 10pm sometimes, and the fact that neither the gentleman nor I have to be in an office at 9am daily, I think it’s understandable that sometimes we don’t go to bed until the wee hours.

It’s worse when the gentleman is away. He at least feels a little guilt about being vaguely nocturnal; I don’t. Which is why I have sometimes found myself, in the last week, napping at strange hours, with the sun fully in my face.

This is the kind of dish that completely depends on high quality ingredients: fresh, gorgeous tomatoes and excellent butter.

I first encountered Cœur de Bœuf tomatoes, a cousin of the American beefsteak tomato, at Ô Chateau in a lovely salad preparation. Its uneven ridges create very small pockets of seeds inside the fruit, so the flesh is not nearly as watery as other tomato varieties. Substantial and fleshy, this variety is perfect for slicing thick and eating raw.

I can’t get over how pretty these slices are, arranged on a big plate — like big tomato flowers.

The other day, David Lebovitz posted a picture of part of his ramekin collection on Instagram. Stacks of variously-sized glazed white porcelain bowls, filling an entire sink. I covet this collection from the depths of my baker-heart.

What is a girl to do but start her own collection of baking vessels? For me, though, it started with tart pans. Pretty little fluted pans in a myriad variety of sizes for a million different uses. Cupcakes? Who needs cupcakes when you can make such daintily ruffled berry-studded tea cakes?

Because really, the problem with food blogging is that sometimes you don’t want to write about cooking. Sometimes you want to bring home a kilogram of green plums and eat them all in one day and make yourself sick. Well, maybe you don’t want to do that last part.

I discovered Reines-Claudes plums at the Bastille market last week, and have been getting way too many at a time because, jesus, they’re so cheap. It’s hard to tell with that glowing green skin, but these are the sweetest plums I’ve ever tasted, without a hint of that shocking acidity just under the skin that their larger, redder and purpler cousins have.

That thing with eating all of them and getting sick? Yeah, I did that. But then I went back and got more because they’re just that good. Now I’m trying them out in recipes so I’m forced to use them instead of just inhaling them.

I have an extremely un-classy thing to compare these muffins to. Okay. Here goes.

Did you ever go to El Torito Grill? It’s this Mexican restaurant chain, mostly found on the west coast. I remember going on a lot of dates there in high school because, you know, it was high school. We had low standards and were low on pocket change.

Anyway. There was this corn cake thing that accompanied a lot of the dishes. Not cornbread, but this wet, doughy corn mash, partly whole corn kernels and partly cornbread. It was kind of sweet and I was addicted to the stuff. I would always order extra.

After a two-week heat wave, it’s starting to cool down in Paris this week. At the Thursday Bastille market, there were yellow and orange leaves littering the ground, and the strawberries were not as numerous or quite as bright and juicy-looking as they were earlier in the summer. I know it’s only August, but as soon as the strawberries start going out, it feels like fall is on its way. What’s say we make a few lovely sun-drenched cakes to stretch out the summer a little longer, hmm?

I’ve made a version of this cake every summer since I moved into my first apartment in college. I don’t remember where that first recipe came from — possibly one of the cookbooks that my roommates brought with them — but this recipe from Martha Stewart by way of Smitten Kitchen is my favorite so far. The milk in the recipe allows the cake to stay moist throughout the long bake time, while the strawberries soften and roast into dimpled puddles of sweet jamminess. The way the strawberries make the batter buckle and puff make it look vaguely quilted. Lovely for company or for afternoon snacking.

An old sweetheart of mine once gave me one of the most interesting compliment I’ve ever received: “I’d like to see you eat a salad. It’s hard to eat a salad gracefully, but I bet you could do it.”

He’s not wrong. About salad, not about my ability to eat it. Salads are, in general, kind of a messy affair. Especially the ones with those pretty and colorful artisanal lettuces that you don’t want to chop that are juuuuust bigger than one mouthful, meaning you get dressing all over your lips trying to get that forkful of unruly greens into your stomach, messing up your lipstick in the process. And don’t even get me started on frisée.

This is the antithesis to those messy, albeit often lovely, lettuce salads. You can eat the entire thing with a spoon. It’s crisp and cold from the raw corn, the chickpeas bring a lovely nuttiness, and the avocado melds with the lemon and olive oil to form a lovely creamy mouthfeel. I toss mine together in about five minutes flat.

Have you ever made a laminated dough? Laminated doughs are the ones that have alternating thin layers of fat and thin layers of dough, resulting in a very flaky, delicate end product. Pâte feuilletée, or puff pastry, is one such dough.

I made puff pastry once, just to see if I could do it. It was in the heat of a Santa Monica summer, and I had trouble with the butter melting and not having enough counter space for all that rolling, but I did it. Every cookbook, blog, and cooking show I’d ever seen suggested that I just buy puff pastry, and now I knew why. It was fun to tackle the challenge, but honestly, it’s not worth the time and effort when there are quality all-butter puff pastry doughs that you can just buy.

But I’ve never really given up the fascination with laminated doughs. It’s a brilliant technique that creates a texture that isn’t reproducible any other way. That’s why I was so excited to find this recipe, which creates a beautiful layered dough without the painstaking folding and prolonged chilling needed for pâte feuilletée. The fact that it uses not butter, but another of my favorite fats, sesame oil, adds to the appeal.

I found real corn at the Bastille market. Non-shrink-wrapped corn, still in husks, clearly picked that day because it was as sweet as I remember summer corn being in California. Hallelujah!

The first couple of ears, I ate raw, straight off the cob. My colleagues used to make fun of me for doing things like that when I had an office job. The rest, I made into simple soup, or this scalloped corn. The corn’s creaminess heightened by béchamel sauce, its crunchiness heightened by bread crumbs, this was a perfect summer side dish.